Art and culture, culture and religion

2.2 Culture and Religion

​Art can express, feelings, emotions, and ideas, it sometimes may be surrounded with religion. Humanity had always searched for some superior power that created life or an answer to some things that remain a mystery, such as what happen after death, the origin of the universe and the purpose of life.

In different cultures and places, the idea of the existence of a god had been an important one, and there are a lot of stories about events such as how the universe was created, who the first human beings were and the battle between good and evil. Those are called myths.

​Myths are not supposed to be real: they are only a way in which people try to establish an early explanation to the world, which would make sense in the context of a particular culture. They created beautiful stories to somehow give a sense of security and meaning to their lives; instead of living in a chaotic and godless world, religion make them think that everything have a reason. Some of the most important gods, to different cultures are Brahman, Vishnu and Shiva (from Hinduism), the Trinity of God: Father, Son and Holy Spirit (Christianity), Quetzalcoatl (Mayan), HaShem (Judaism), Allah (Islam) and Zeus (Greek).

In the Bible, the universe was created by God using the word, similar to what a writer do with their texts, a painter with their paintbrush or a musician with their instruments.

As was mentioned earlier, the justification for the existence of gods is to explain things that remains in a mystery. One of them is the creation of humans: where do we come from? Why did we exist?

We can’t address all the religious histories of every civilization, but you should know that histories from the Bible and Christianity had been a very important theme on paintings and sculptures, especially for the European civilization. Church was a very influential force and was very powerful during a long time but started to lose power when the Protestant Reformation began (when different religions where created, like Lutheranism and Anglicanism), at 1517. Let’s look at two different religious histories.

Draw

Represent how humans were created? where do we come from?

The artist is a product of their time and, consciously or not, they represent their context. Artists would take what they appreciate from their environment and transform it, maybe into something similar to reality or into something abstract.

​The cultural context of the artist would be reflected in the work, maybe as religious values, but it also can show nationalist or social aspects. Napoleon Bonaparte, as told by Schneider (2008) adopted the style of the Neoclassical period, in which artists tried to return to the Classical period because he thinks that kind of art would exalt his figure. You can find some paintings from Jacques-Louis David that shows Napoleon in heroic or important moments, like in The Coronation of Napoleon in Notre Dame or Napoleon Crossing the Alps. In this case, art was used to achieve a political purpose

​2.3 CULTURAL HERITAGE

Probably, you’ll never know when was the first time that the human being made art, but you can have an idea. You can find manifestations of art from 17 000 years ago in the Lascaux Caves, in France, for example, where some paintings of animals, humans and signs can be found

​Art can be analyzed through different lenses, like the ones of History, Religion or Politics. Perception of art varies depending on the information that you have; that’s why you always need to investigate about the context of production of the artwork. Art is different from culture to culture and, even if you don’t know how the art began, you surely know that on their main purposes is to communicate things that can’t be said in any other way

Open Ended

Can you find art in politics? Give an example of how or where can we see it being applied?